


Europe

by EnglandsGray



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Absence, Angst, Beauty - Freeform, Between Seasons/Series, Canon Compliant, Episode: s03e01 The Empty Hearse, F/M, Loneliness, Loss, Missing Scenes, Post-Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Pre-Relationship, Sherlolly - Freeform, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:47:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27945509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglandsGray/pseuds/EnglandsGray
Summary: "He observes, and he sees the reality.  She observes, and she sees the beauty.  Not only that, she embodies it – as nature does – and that is the painful truth of her."Moments which might have taken place in the long months after the fall, finishing with Sherlock walking away from Molly through the snow, carrying the weight of a loss he is yet to understand.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson, Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper
Comments: 17
Kudos: 30





	Europe

**Author's Note:**

> Recently, Tim Minchin broke my heart for the first time in the 15 years I have been a fan of his. If you haven't heard his first album Apart Together, I recommend it wholeheartedly. This fic is inspired by the gorgeously haunting lyrics of The Absence of You and by Tim's concept of loss having mass. 
> 
> Unending gratitude and love go to him and not just for this most recent, beautiful work. And of course all rights to the song and lyrics belong to him. Credit for Sherlock, Molly, John and this achingly terrible time for all of them in between series 2 and 3 goes, as ever, to the creators and the BBC. I do not own, but I do love <3 
> 
> Yet more thanks and love to OhAine for beta-reading, kind words, inspiration, support, giggles. Thank you.

**Europe**

He observes. It’s what he does. Uses the tools available to him to gather data and send it to the brain which is the very point of all this. The river, muddied by continuous, unpausing use. Bridge after bridge, like sutures attempting to close a stubborn and stressed wound. But the water refuses to be corralled. He shakes his head, takes a breath through the nose. Glucose, carbon, petroleum, ozone, dust, expensive cologne and cheap anti-perspirant. Trapped in the mist hovering over the river and wheedling its way in between fibres. Noise. Incessant noise. 

A small, incongruous article. Hidden in plain sight. He reaches for it, manipulates the cold metal to allow him to quickly snip through the bolt, unnoticed. Hands return to pockets, a step back is taken. Another deep breath. Another clue. Another piece of the puzzle, another thread in the web. 

He is about to turn. At least his motor neurons wish him to believe he is about to turn. Unfortunately – and it is, indeed, supremely unfortunate – there are other elements of his system which it transpires he can know everything about and yet still misunderstand. And it is these parts of him which keep his feet rooted to the spot and prevent his eyes moving on to tracking the action he ought to be taking. 

Either side of where sat the padlock he holds in his left palm, now robbing his skin of heat, making him colder, are two more. Well, it would be more accurate to say there are thousands more. But his eye is caught by just these two. Innocuous, unrelated, insignificant, coincidental…

One is engraved with a simple J. The second with the letter M, entwined with another initial he does not care to commit to memory. 

Put simply, his mind is bigger than him, greater than him. A palace, a seat of empire, full of rooms and full of doors over which he has control and locks to which he holds the keys. But sometimes… try as he might and with every fibre of his own concept of himself, the doors remain flung open as if blown by sudden and strong winds.

On those days, the loss he carries is weighty, it has mass. On those days; work or oblivion. 

Eyes shift, torso follows, feet receive the message, heart is forgotten. Pushed down. Traffic pushes on through the spray heading towards St. Germain and headlights begin the process of illuminating the city, the gaudiness of the tower not long for igniting at which point he would long for the understatement of home. More so. More than that. 

**Echoes of ten thousand sighs of love**

**And yet I feel only the absence of you.**

**\---**

**Europe**

Objectively, she is desirable. Her hair is long, poker-straight, silken. Her skin is flawless. Her body as honed as her skillset. His thumb grazes her breast as his hand travels up her side. This feature, too, obeys the predictable tendencies of attraction in size and shape. As do her lips. Painted scarlet… Parted, bitten. 

Yet this is the very tragedy of her. She is an object – she has been made so. Whether of her own volition or under duress he has neither the time or resource to assimilate and resolve, for his focus must remain on the task which lay ahead. One false move, and each of them would be subject to the deadliest reaches of the other’s capability. 

_… auburn hair and gentleness… another mind… she has no need of alterations… others are not deserving… I truly see…_

An artless way, this. _The_ artless way. But the quickest and most effective, given the apparent power of lust and the assumptions made about it by the imbeciles who front their operation with agents such as the one stood at the open French doors of his hotel room, inches from him. 

Her shoulders are bare, his fingers skim until they reach her jaw before he takes her scull between his hands. He smells the liquor on her breath before their lips meet for those brief seconds. He only vaguely wonders whether she inhales the scent of whiskey. 

The spirit did not help. He gives a moment’s consideration to what or whom she might have been trying to forget before she came here. 

**For a moment we kiss, but her vodka-soaked lips**

**Taste only of the absence of you.**

**\---**

**London**

**Molly**

Every. Single. Organ. Every one. Gently and with care and consideration and trust which mustn’t be broken. Removed. Until only a gaping cavity remains. It doesn’t affect her. Life happens, death happens, understanding matters. 

Where, though, was the training for accepting half-life? The handbook for coping with death-in-part. He was not alive, he was not dead, she was an empty cavity. Made inhuman through her act of compassion. A liar and a betrayer of the people she had started to forgive herself for loving. 

Did she have to start again? Again? The fact she was more than capable didn’t make it all right to expect it of her. 

If her friends thought – if they honestly believed – this person could fill the void simply because there was no visible reason why not, then they clearly failed to properly grasp the way a person fits together. We are made up of more than what fits. The cavity gapes without the pieces we don’t get to touch or know.

It isn’t the height or the curls or the posher-than-her, she does know. It might be the right proportions, but the dressing would probably be overpowered by the wound. But here there is _presence_. They dance. They kiss. The pub by the river does sound nice. But she wants to look over her shoulder.

**When we are apart**

**There’s a hole in my heart**

**That light passes through.**

**And the pattern it creates**

**Is the shape of the absence of you.**

**\---**

**London**

**John**

_There isn’t a person in my line of sight who you wouldn’t think was an idiot._

_It’s April, it’s freezing. Even I think the guy in shorts is a twat. But here we are, or rather here I am. On the grass with all the other desperate sun-seekers, clutching my latte and trying not to shiver. Wish I had my sunglasses, mind. Don’t ever expect me to admit that there are benefits to being in your shadow – but - could do with your hulking-great malevolent presence just slightly south-east of me._

_It’s never getting easier, is it? This is it now. This is Living With It. Christ, you’re not the first. But you’ll probably be the last. Only a complete nutcase would even offer to get that close, and I’m not sure I’d ever let them… Look where it gets us._

_Still. Bloody solitude and… effing silence. You can keep them, mate. Being alone never did me any favours._

**But the grass to the side of the patch where I’m lying**

**Is flat with the absence of you.**

\---

**London**

**Molly**

She has her health. She has a home. She has a job she loves. She has friends, some of whom even care about her. She has the chance of a new family, a new future… she has someone’s trust and their promise.

Her arm is leaden, her hand heavy with the ring sat there on her finger. Several diamonds too many glitter away to themselves in the moonlight, so she turns her face to the right on her pillow, hiding. She does love him, they are happy, she _had not lied_ when she said yes. 

Her right hand drifts upwards gently, the backs of her fingers caress the sheet, gently rising and falling with the dips. Tears soak the pillowcase. 

She is alone in her bed on the night she became a fiancée, at the end of the day she committed to be someone’s legal other half. And why? Because she needed to commune with an empty space.

You hear of people who visit the grave of a lover to ask for permission. Or forgiveness. Bridal bouquets laid on headstones. She wasn’t asking for either and she had nothing to offer.

He can wrap that bloody coat around him as tight and for as long as he likes and she can imitate him. She can fit herself into the space she’d let him take up and imagine the scent of him. But they can’t get warm. It isn’t allowed. 

**A space in my bed**

**As cold as the dead.**

**Exactly the size and the shape of the absence of you.**

**\---**

**Home**

The very great trouble with beauty is its subjectivity. Pleasing the senses, pleasing the mind. The dancing of the fool, the minutiae of the universe, the descent of a snowflake, the glint of a blade. He did not care that others could not see what he could, although his incredulity might overspill into voice. Neither did he care that those elements of being which evoked a reaction in his system which could be accredited to aesthetics, turned the stomachs of those _others_. 

The danger of beauty lay in its subtle capability to influence. Those consciously tenuous but primitively compelling stimuli which alter not just the psyche, but the very essence. 

Flighty, then, this temptress. How to manage it, how to mitigate its power? Minimise exposure, limit the opportunity to process. Choose not to observe. Refuse. And where that is simply impossible; control and rationalise. Use. 

It was so with music. The act of composing translating the flow of that part of his being which was bent to expression, into legible marks on the page. A tool, meeting an objective, aiding a greater purpose; engaging his subconscious processing systems and encouraging people to leave him the hell alone. He steadfastly refused to infer any further, and thus he had mastery. 

It’s snowing, he casts his eyes to the cloud cover. It won’t settle. He draws his coat closer around him, pulls the upturned collar higher. For protection. Something more than the frigid wind takes the heat from his skin and he feels that bitter, weighty void in his middle. Neither can he entirely attribute the sensation to the lack of companionship he is enduring, heightened by the physical proximity he had silently craved. But though the reason is obscure, he can sense the danger. 

Behind him, walking in the opposite direction, is a person who does not require such things as a room full of impressionable strangers or a few minutes of CCTV footage to keep the darkness at bay. Someone who is guileless, unable to derive satisfaction from matching intellect against the petty whimsies of the weak. She sees only the broken heart. Keen to share amusement in the peculiarities of the genuine, yet she fails to quickly cast the shadow of suspicion upon the suspect, even when the evidence is in front of her.

He observes, and he sees the reality. She observes, and she sees the beauty. Not only that, she embodies it – as nature does – and that is the painful truth of her.

Would she have slipped the ring from her finger along with the glove if he had taken up her suggestion of dinner? And if the intensity with which she had just looked at him had compelled her to spend what remained of the day with him?

Did he - could he – deny the very great want to have her near...? And if the warmth of her cheek he allowed to sink beneath his skin rather then dissipate into the November air… If he allowed himself to truly experience what it felt like to fall, free of thoughts of the end, guided…

What then?

Ruin. Desolation, whether immediate or excruciatingly slow. Because if he were to allow what remained of his heart to drive his existence, he would lay waste to any life which came into contact with his. He is a construct, man-made, a fabrication. Unnatural. She deserves happiness and that is not him. His inaction keeps her safe, his apparent incapability her greatest ally. The darkness crowds around and this night will not be good. Alone is what he has.

Except now, there is a shadow which did not exist before. He cannot grasp it, cannot comprehend it, cannot understand it, cannot hold it even though the compulsion to is blindingly strong…

Love is a dangerous disadvantage and beauty is the gateway. Once the armour is pierced, its integrity is forever compromised. He has no choice but to continue, carrying with him this unknowable weight which has become so much harder to bear since he was offered a helping hand. 

She walks away. He walks away. The shadow follows, miserable in want of light.

**And all of this beauty runs over and through me**

**And pools ‘round my shoes.**

**And the puddle it forms**

**Conforms to the shape of**

**The Absence of You.**


End file.
